Our grandmothers would be ashamed. Just listen to the music we’re bumping and grinding to at parties.
Look at what we’re wearing! Look at what Anthony Weiner posted on his Twitter account! This scantily clad, sexually free society appears to have broken all the rules.
Each generation comes up with some way to define itself. The baby boomers had the Beatles and Vietnam War protests. Those from the Jazz Age had flappers and bebop. But what all of these have in common is a radical confrontation against the everyday behavior of the previous generation’s culture.
Grandma might have some reason to pine for the old days, but what we want to know is, was she so innocent herself?
What follows is the ultimate verdict, in which we pit our generation against previous generations to see just who really is the dirtiest of them all.
Parental discretion is advised.
Dirty politics
If music has sex, drugs, and rock and roll, politics has sex, money, and votes.
To understand the dirtiness of politics, just look at the variety of scandals throughout history: public land buyouts in the Gilded Age, Watergate, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his mysterious Argentinian romance, and even Weinergate.
While sex scandals might dominate political coverage in the media, political science professor Marjorie Hershey says the prevalence of scandals in politics is often blown out of proportion. If anything, history has tamed the political arena through experience.
“In the Gilded Age, there was a lot less in the way of regulation,” Hershey says. “The expansion of regulation has just made it more difficult for people to get away with the kinds of things they could pull off a hundred years ago.”
But you can’t regulate sex and romance — especially when sex scandals take so many unprecedented forms. Still, Hershey insists the media is mostly to blame for creating the illusion that politicians are any more scandalous than before.
“I think we have to be cautious about seeing Anthony Weiner and saying that ‘politicians are such and such,’” she says, referring to the assumption that all politicians are prone to sex scandals.
The bigger issue, according to Hershey, is that the public is more interested in reading about sex and corruption than anything else a politician does.“The guys who go around exposing themselves in public are a pretty small proportion,” Hershey says. “Why should anyone care about them? You can find that on any big street corner.”
THE VERDICT: THEN
Sexy political scandals
may be fun to read about, but messing with livelihoods like they did in the
Gilded Age? That’s truly evil.
Dirty dancing
“Now they are dancing the godless, Weller or Spinner,” singer Kunz Haas wrote after witnessing a new dance in Vienna in 1580. The sexual intensity of the steps and the physical closeness of the men and women appalled him.
The offensive dance? The forebearer of the waltz.
As people became more accepting of other cultures, Selene Carter, an IU dance instructor and dance history teacher, says social dance began to change rapidly. Moves and beats from Latin and African cultures popped up on the dance floor as the tango and the oh-so-scandalous Twist.
“The Twist was the first dance where people separated from a partner. You could dance it by yourself, with a partner or a group of people,” Carter says. “It was liberating.”
Yet Carter says she wouldn’t be quick to dismiss the sexuality of previous generations’ ballroom dances. Partner dancing is restrained and sometimes restraint can be sexy, she says.
That’s not saying all ballroom dances are restrained.
“The bachata? Yeah, definitely not subtle,” says Becca Mandell of the IU Ballroom Dance Club. “It’s basically face-to-face grinding.”
Grinding, the social dance of the moment, provides a slight dilemma for dancers like Carter. “On one hand, a free pelvis on a mobile spine is a very expressive move. As a dancer, I value my freedom. On the other, it can definitely be done for the wrong reasons.”
Grinding only becomes dirty, she explains, when it is the sole dance move in someone’s repertoire and performed without the consent of both partners.
“Secrets and shame are dirty,” she says. “Oppressing others and yourself is dirty. Dancing with free expression is not.”
THE VERDICT: NOWThey may have the tango, but we have the Pop, Lock, and Drop It.
One dirty meadow
They came with chains and padlocks. Hundreds of students marching from Dunn Meadow to Bryan Hall.
After the May 4, 1970, shooting at Kent State, students in Bloomington were looking for a reaction from the IU administration. They bound themselves to the doors of Bryan Hall. And they waited.
This anti-war protest was one of many on the IU campus in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1969, students rallied against a 68 percent tuition increase. The protest led to the Ballantine lock-in, where a group of students pressured IU administrators by locking them in a room.
In October, nearly 3,500 students carried candles from Dunn Meadow to Showalter Fountain in protest of the Vietnam War.
At a May 13, 1970, protest, more than 100 students blocked traffic on Indiana Avenue. But when then-Monroe County Sheriff Clifford Thrasher walked through the crowd, the students began to back up.
Thrasher searched for the perpetrator who dared to utter the vulgar word.
Hess was arrested and charged a $25 fine. His case, overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, reminds us of a time when students stood for a cause and recognized the place for protest on campus.
